Whether your customers store their data on-premises or in the cloud, it must be protected. This information not only contains business data, but intellectual property and customer records, too. Outfitting your customers with the very best storage security solutions is of paramount importance.
A recent paper published by the Enterprise Storage Forum reviews five of the top storage security trends that today’s solution providers need to be aware of in 2022.
Here they are, in no particular order.
Kubernetes Storage
Containerization has risen in popularity as it is easy to deploy and improves affordability, flexibility, and scalability. Unfortunately, because it is so simple to roll out, enterprises tend to deploy faster with their containerization, or Kubernetes, implementation without fully considering how best to protect their data. In fact, a study by one storage vendor found that just one-third of companies that have deployed Kubernetes so far have the tools in place to protect against data-loss incidents, such as ransomware.
SaaS Security
The ease with which developers and business heads can download Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications has made it incredibly difficult for solution providers to stay on top of who is using what, where, and when. A company’s SaaS acquisition and consumption policies must consider the employees who will purchase and use both sanctioned and unsanctioned SaaS applications. And because the SaaS market is always expanding (and becoming increasingly decentralized), solution providers need to provide their customers a framework that provides continuous monitoring for any new SaaS usage, with the ability to centrally control access for every user and their associated storage.
Edge Storage
Data at the edge has grown increasingly popular as it allows customers to analyze data at their edge sites instead of sending it to the cloud. Now, add in the fact that there are more than 50 billion Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the market right now. This means there is more data at the edge than anywhere else. With this increase in data, solution providers must put in place security solutions solutions to store the data and protect it. Unfortunately, physical security limitations at smaller sites, coupled with the fact that encrypting data can be expensive and difficult to manage, makes protecting edge data a difficult endeavor. As such, solution providers must implement encryption on all storage devices and applications at the edge and use centralized key management solutions to fully address these challenges.
Blended Storage
There’s no denying the popularity and general acceptance of blended storage. This is due in large part to the fact that hybrid cloud has quickly become the standard form of operation for the modern enterprise. Unfortunately, this, in turn, has challenged solution providers with the task of ensuring security at all levels for these blended storage environments. Here, it is important to educate customers of the new ways to access data, and that storage security must be broadened. Customers who are migrating file data to object storage also need to ensure they are configuring permissions correctly.
Connecting to Storage
Solution providers need to protect their customers’ information when it is being transmitted, migrated, uploaded, or downloaded. Unfortunately, enterprises often use VPNs to migrate data, and this can serve as a weak point. This is because the practice of authenticating a user to a network through a VPN is quickly becoming obsolete as more employees are working remotely and are no longer connected to the company network. What’s more, user expectations are also changing, as they now expect to be able to access any application from any device anywhere in the world. As such, many enterprises are replacing yesterday’s access solutions with cloud-based secure web gateways. This access problem, if you will, is best solved through identity management, especially in this new age of cloud and SaaS.
